I want to recommend a film to you. Pull up your Netflix account and drop MirrorMask into your queue. MirrorMask is what the Henson kids are up to now that they're not making muppet movies anymore, and though it's almost entirely computer animated, fans of The Dark Crystal should see this film. I'm not saying that if you loved that film then you'll like this one (though that is true for me) but I am saying that there is some little bit of that Jim Henson Company of yester-year that is alive and kicking today in this new film and it did my heart good to see it. I sincerely hope that Jim is proud of his kids, wherever he is. I am, if I have any right.
MirrorMask was written by Neil Gaiman and it feels like it. A few of you may be familiar with Good Omens which Mr. Gaiman wrote with another fine fantasy writer, Terry Prachett, a book I thrust upon just about everyone I know. But if this is your only experience with Mr. Gaiman, you'll be going into MirrorMask with the wrong impression. His own work is much darker.
Mirror is appropriate enough, for the story is a bit. . . recycled. In it I could see reflections, both intentional and otherwise, of Wonderland, characters of Narnia and the angles and shadows of a labyrinth I once knew. One sequence reminded me of Legend, and readers of The Talisman will find themselves on strangely familiar ground again.
That doesn't bother me though. As fantasy readers, we expect it to a certain degree, don't we? Most modern fantasy sings of Tolkien, in whose work you can see the Arthurian legends, which in turn plant their roots in older fables. Fantasy is, in essence, the same story told over and over again. Any book you pick up is The Never-Ending Story, whether or not it has the Auryn symbol on the cover. It is like this not because we demand it (oh, but we do) but because that is the way the story goes and somehow we know it.
That is why when millions of Stephen King fans turned the last page of the Dark Tower Series, they said, "Yes, that is how it ends. Of course. It couldn't have ended any other way."
Of course not. That's the way the story goes.
Storytellers are scribes. They tap into a story and then tell it to others. And when they stop serving that story, when they betray their characters, you know it. You say, "It started off well, but it fell flat at the end." "His characters aren't believable." You feel that betrayal. The storyteller is not God. He does not choose who lives or dies. The ending does not come from his imagination. His imagination is just the door that lets you in. No more, no less.
I had a teacher in 9th grade English who said that all stories broke down to "the hero's journey," a cyclical plot that takes all successful characters from beginning to end. All heroes face the abyss where they learn that Darth Vader is their father and say that can't go on. And all characters walk into that final battle alone, without the aide of their friends.
"But why?" asks Sir Didymus.
"Because that is the way it is done," she says.
"If it that is the way it is done then that is the way you must do it."
True enough.
This teacher, whose face I can remember but whose name I cannot, told us that when a story broke from the hero's journey cycle, we as readers lost interest in it. She left the school a few years after I had her class and though I can't remember her name I always remembered that lesson and pondered it, sometimes rejecting it and sometimes accepting as something I knew to be true whether I objected or not. I heard she left to write a book about "the hero's journey." I wonder how it came out.
In any case, I'm drifting a bit. I came to tell you about MirrorMask and my point, buried in all this somewhere, is that the story, recycled or not, held my attention. Through some remarkable artwork and a familiar...let's call it an essense..they made it their own. And when it was done and the credits rolled I smiled at the reflections of other stories I saw hidden in between the lines.
After all, that's how the story goes.